A fine disregard: what makes modern art modern

Description

Editorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly Taking on critics of all stripes, Varnedoe argues that modern art was not deterministically shaped by the grinding-wheel of social forces, new technologies or foreign influences. The flatness of Degas's pictorial space, he contends, owes less to Japanese prints or photography than to an unprecedented late-19th-century burst of experimentation with perspective. In Picasso's and Gauguin's primitivism, Varnedoe discerns a process of pulling objects out of their original contexts in order to alter our way of seeing. With reference to 286 plates (one-third in color), he shows how artists have changed the rules as he considers the devices of fragmentation (from Rodin to Pop Art) and the use of an overhead view (from Andre Kertesz's aerial photographs to Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty earthwork). Director of painting and sculpture at New York's Museum of Modern Art, Varnedoe makes a novel case for modern art as an opening up of human potential driven by individual creativity. Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal This is a group of four broadly connected essays attempting to define that now-old question, What is modern art about? Varnedoe (director of painting and sculpture, Museum of Modern Art) identifies four characteristics--juxtaposition of near and far, fragmentation and repetition, primitivism, and a viewpoint from above--which he discusses in the context of art from 1870 to 1950. His insights and readings of the facts are frequently fresh and provocative, if not always convincing. Less documentary than Robert Hughes's Shock of the New , Varnedoe's essays are occasionally mixed in tone, as though given as lectures. Nevertheless, this is a serious work on modern art; recommended. Jack Perry Brown, Ryerson & Burnham Libs., Art Inst . of Chicago Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. CONTENTS ONE / INTRODUCTION TWO / NEAR AND FAR THREE / FRAGMENTATION AND REPETITION FOUR / PRIMITIVISM FIVE / OVERVIEW: THE FLIGHT OF THE MIND NOTES ONE / INTRODUCTION TWO / NEAR AND FAR THREE / FRAGMENTATION AND REPETITION FOUR / PRIMITIVISM FIVE/ OVERVIEW: THE FLIGHT OF THE MIND LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS INDEX ACKNOWLEDGMENTS PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS